Which Side Are You On, God, Which Side Are You On?

The Civil War persists in American history, often unnerving our sense of historical time. My parents, born in 1919 and 1920, recalled seeing Civil War veterans marching in Memorial Day parades in Chicago. The last living solider from the Union army, Albert Henry Woolson of Minnesota, died when I was two years old. Maudie White Hopkins, the "last Confederate widow," had married a man who once fought in a war to preserve slavery. She passed away in 2008, the same year that the United States elected its first African American president. Yet, for the most part, the Civil War lies deeply in the past. The picture of two armies arrayed against each other in open fields with muskets strikes us as ancient history. The level of human carnage remains hard to comprehend. At this writing, 1,461 American soldiers have died fighting in Afghanistan since 2001. On September 17, 1862, at the Battle of Antietam, 2,108 Union soldiers were killed. The religious world of the Civil War remains equally alien. Recognizing that an extremely wide range of contemporary beliefs exist, I think it safe to say that a providential interpretation of human events—the belief that God directs the course of human affairs—is no longer a governing majority assumption in American life. Entering the religious sensibilities of the time thus remains a challenge for the Civil War historian.

In God's Almost Chosen People, prolific and talented historian George C. Rable has provided us with the best religious history of the Civil War we are likely to see in our lifetime. In this long, thorough, inclusive, intelligent, and sensitive study, Rable seeks to demonstrate how "religious beliefs shaped popular thinking on the conflict" (p. 7). His research in both published and manuscript sources is prodigious. The use of quotations is skillful and judicious. It is hard to imagine a more inclusive history. The book gives as equal and balanced attention to both North and South as is perhaps possible. Rable pays appropriate attention to major Protestant denominations—Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians—yet also includes numerically smaller ones such as Episcopalians and Quakers. Catholics receive considerable space as well. Rable describes a Catholic counter-narrative during the secession crisis that was based on a call for Catholic national unity around faith and a standard liturgy. We see Catholic Sisters working in hospitals as nurses. American Jews appear in more than a perfunctory role. We hear rabbis preaching politics from the pulpit and learn about the Ladies Hebrew Association for the Relief of Sick and Wounded Soldiers in Philadelphia. African Americans of whatever denomination—enslaved, emancipated, and military—receive attention, too.

God's Almost Chosen Peoples is topically inclusive as well. Its characters include fire-eating clergymen, abolitionist ministers, army chaplains, Christian soldiers, blasphemers, freethinkers, and nurses. There are more than occasional references to the leading intellectuals among American churchmen, such as Horace Bushnell of the North and James Henley Thornwell of the South. Rable offers a critical discussion of the Confederate deification of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson as the ideal Christian soldier. There are the usual anecdotes of pocket Bibles that saved lives by stopping enemy bullets. We get a glimpse into the religious life of Civil War prisons. We see how the war on the home front, especially in embattled communities like Missouri, divided congregations and denominations.

In his discussion of camp religion, Rable debunks the myth of a Civil War fought by Christian armies. While he acknowledges the revivals that spread through the Confederate armies during the winter and spring of 1863, he argues that observant Christians actually comprised a small minority of Civil War soldiers. Rable instead presents a picture of widespread blasphemy, gambling, and drinking in both armies. There were nearly 200,000 cases of sexually transmitted diseases in the...